Crimson Truths
Reality has a hearing at Harvard.

By Stanley Kurtz, fellow at the Hudson Institute
March 2, 2001 9:25 a.m.

hat a joke tenure has become.  Academic tenure was supposed to free its beneficiaries to speak openly and honestly in the face of intimidation.  But there are so many more things to be afraid of than losing your job.  To speak the truth about affirmative action or grade inflation in today's university is to invite protest, harassment, and ostracism.  To openly oppose a public-policy reform like gay marriage is to invite the same.  Two professors at Montreal's McGill University found this out recently when their plans to testify against gay marriage in a major Canadian court case brought a storm of protest down on their heads from gay student organizations.  It is this fear of protest, harassment, and ostracism that silences those tenured professors who might otherwise speak out against the dogmas of the day.

So let us all hail Harvey Mansfield, possibly the only professor left in the academy with the guts to use tenure the way it was meant to be used.  I know that NRO readers have been hearing a good deal about Mansfield lately, but that's because his years of courage in the face of moral intimidation may finally be drawing real blood from his countless foes.  Mansfield's brilliant decision to give his students both an inflated grade and a real grade may be on the verge of drawing national attention onto the distortions forced on the academy by sixties thinking in general, and affirmative action in particular.  ABC's 20/20 was just at Harvard investigating the grade-inflation problem, and Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, has just published an important piece  that not only confirms the reality of grade inflation, but also gives considerable credence to Mansfield's controversial claim that affirmative action helped cause grade inflation to begin with.

When Mansfield released figures showing that more than half of all Harvard grades are A's or A minuses, he made the front page of the Boston Globe, and saw the story picked up by the Associated Press.  But sentiment quickly turned against Mansfield when he let it be known that, in his view, affirmative action was one of the major engines driving grade inflation.  Harvard's Black Student's Association quickly demanded Mansfield's censure, and staged a sit-in at one of his lectures.  But the in-depth story just published by the Crimson presents considerable evidence for Mansfield's assertion.

The Crimson story is remarkable in itself, since many a student paper would shy away from the fair-minded assessment of the issue that the Crimson presents us with.  Only yesterday, the Daily Cal, UC Berkeley's student newspaper, ran a craven apology by its editors for having allowed a paid ad opposing reparations for slavery to appear in its pages.  Yet the increasing willingness of Harvard's Crimson to give conservative critiques of the academy a fair hearing is a hopeful sign.  It just may be that the overwhelming dominance of the Left at our colleges and universities is on the verge of provoking an open counter-reaction by thoughtful students.

Because transcripts are kept secret, no one can definitively document the relationship between affirmative action and grade inflation.  But plenty of people are quoted by the Crimson supporting Mansfield's claim that fear of handing out low grades to minority students admitted under affirmative action helped to launch grade inflation in the late sixties and early seventies.  My own recent experience teaching at Harvard tells me that little has changed since then.

I certainly remember hearing older graduate students in the late seventies saying that they couldn't hand out bad grades to minorities.  And when I taught at Harvard in the late nineties, although there were certainly minority students who performed at a high level, there was no doubt that my weakest students were disproportionately African American and Hispanic.  Often the gap between these minority students and the rest was dramatic.  That put me in a difficult position.  If my minority students received lower grades than the others, I might be accused of racism.  And given the fact that I was already fighting my fellow faculty members over leftist bias in the curriculum, low minority grades might easily be used as a weapon to silence me.

It isn't just fear either; it's also love.  I cared deeply for my students.  It wasn't the fault of my weaker minority students that some elite liberal's guilt had thrown them into a situation for which they were ill prepared.  They might easily have flourished at another college.  My sections and seminars were small and I got to know all of my students quite well.  It hurts to give a kid who's honestly trying to do his best the kind of grade that, at Harvard, can only bring shame.  Fear and love — it takes more than tenure to gainsay their power.  In the end, it's best to grade your students honestly — for their sake and yours.  But it's hardly a surprise, given the terrible distortions and pressures created by admitting good kids who aren't quite up to it, that few professors do so.

Of course there's more than affirmative action at work here.  Grade inflation certainly owes much to the student evaluations of professors instituted since the sixties.  Given the tight teaching market, student evaluations can make or break a teaching assistant's career.  And bad grades often — although not always — yield bad evaluations.  And there's no doubt that the sixties ethos has made it difficult to force anyone to feel bad by giving them something as nasty as a low grade.  I remember trying to flunk a (non-minority) Harvard student years ago when I was a teaching assistant.  Not only did he hand in failing work, he'd skipped out on classes.  For me, his  shirking of class was the last straw.  But the tenured professors who ran the class forced me to raise the grade.  They knew that a failing grade would only bring down Harvard's scrutiny.  And despite their tenure, Harvard had plenty of ways of making their time at the university unpleasant.

That little boy who shamed an emperor into acknowledging his own nakedness was too young to fear the wrath of king or crowd.  But Harvey Mansfield is a man, not a boy.  And what a man.  Harvard University Press, in an act of intellectual bigotry turned down Mansfield's proposal for a book on manliness.  I, for one, would do anything to learn the secret of this man's virile courage.  I speak from outside the academy, where I can escape the cost of my words.  Yet day by day, year by year, Harvey C. Mansfield transforms the academy from within — with truth, with spirit, with courage.  A simple grade of A is inadequate to this performance.  In a massive national professorate, this man has no peer.